@sciencecop
Ha, love the screenname! If you’d read some of my input into other threads, e.g. my giving the skeptical case in the cables forum, you’d see people probably think I ought to have your screen name :-) If you think I’m arguing that measurements simply don’t matter, I’m not.
I am sure you heard a piano before, so have I.
Yup.
Grew up with, at one point, 4 pianos in our house. (Both parents music teachers/musicians, pianos accumulated from previous family etc). We all played.
I disagree that the Devore speakers "can’t do a piano." I got more of the sense of "real piano" from the Devore speakers from any number of other speakers I listened to, including ones I’m sure you would deem more accurate. (I especially got a more consistent sense of keys upon a resonating sounding board/body, vs the often "piano keys floating in space" effect on many systems).
Now, I’m not saying that "I am right" and that the Devore speakers are "simply better" in some way. Far from it. They certainly ARE compromised in ways, and even in some ways that make them *less accurate* with some piano recordings than another speaker. The problem is most speakers are compromised in some way, and worse, much of the whole reproduced sound chain is a series of compromises. So...we picks our compromises.
Of course some speakers will measure more accurate than others - depending on what you term "accurate."
But once we are talking about the life-like quality of reproduced sound, then it gets more subjective because people often focus on different things, have different criteria, and some speakers do X better, others may do Y. You may hear a system run with classic tube amps and hear it as "less real" because, maybe you focus on the softening of transients, less tight bass, etc. Whereas I may hear it as "more believable" because it sounds less mechanical, richer, softer, more organic, especially for voices.
Ideally, the most accurate-measuring speaker should produce the most accurately realistic sound. IF the recording chain has been controlled so you are starting with an accurate/natural recording.
But given we use our systems to listen to an utter mish-mash of source quality, and source type, THEN it may be the case that some cannily introduced deviations from measured accuracy could, for some listeners, make a greater number of recordings sound more "realistic" and believable. They may be "less accurate" in terms of a measurement goal, but "more accurate" to the listener’s perception in terms of life-like sound. (Or a speaker may emphasize doing something "better" in terms of life-like at the expense of something else - e.g. dynamics over flat frequency response, or some such trade off).
In terms of measurements, I’m sure the Magico A3 (once someone measures it) will look excellent, as most Magicos tend to measure.And yet when I played some well recorded drum tracks on the Magicos, and closed my eyes asking the "does it sound like real drums in front of me?"...they certainly sounded clean and detailed. But it didn’t give me a "real drums" impression. But those same tracks on the Devore speakers, eyes closed, and it just brought the opposite impression - "wow, does that ever capture something very real about what it’s like to sit in front of a drum set!" (Something I’ve had life-long experience listening to).
What I’m getting at is that you seem to be coming from a position where you want to say "What I like is accurate; what you like is colored. If you like colored sound, that’s fine. Just don’t pretend it’s accurate." Which if we are talking about measured accuracy that could be valid (though still with caveats).
And what I’m saying is that once we are talking about listener’s subjective impression of the believability of a system - the "accuracy" to aspects of real sound we are chasing - then the "what I like is accurate; what you like is inaccurate" doesn’t fly so much. Your own subjective impression of the realism of the system does not necessarily trump someone else’s as being "correct."
BTW, have you actually listened to the Devore speakers?
As John Atkinson has often opined in his measurements section, and as many speaker designers will tell you: measurements certainly CAN tell you quite a bit. But given lots of the complexity and variables involved,
you often can’t tell precisely how a speaker will sound and surprises still happen. As, for instance, JA mentions in his measurements section for the Devores - they did some things better in measurements than he would have expected (even given his decades and decades of measuring speakers he can’t simply predict what he’ll get just by knowing the speaker design), and while his measurements predicted *some* aspect of their sound, the Devores ultimately sounded more agreeable and less colored than he expected from his measurements.
Cheers.